Canada’s NATO: Seventy Years of Commitment and Re-Commitment

Abstract

During the first two years of the Donald Trump administration, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) being criticized by the President of its largest and most indispensable member, Canada has emerged has one of the most vocal defenders of the venerable trans-Atlantic Alliance. And while Washington may not fully believe that Canada is doing enough toward making NATO “strong, secure, and engaged”, it continues to welcome and acknowledge the contributions which the highly regarded Canadian Armed Forces are making in Latvia, Ukraine, and Iraq. Ironically, if the Trump administration should suddenly change its tune and whole heartedly embrace NATO’s importance to American security, it might ask for even “more Canada”. This would place Ottawa in a difficult position as it would upset Ottawa’s ‘just enough’ approach to allied obligations. Such approach has been a story of commitment and re-commitment, and never ‘de-commitment’. Even when defence budgets were slashed, when Prime Ministers and Ministers of National Defence mused openly about the value and cost of membership, when the number of troops, tanks, and planes stationed in Europe were markedly reduced and eventually eliminated altogether, and when Canada seemed to provide the Alliance with little more than a “bare presence” and participation in allied councils, being in NATO was the sine qua non of Canadian international relations. Whatever the benefits the Alliance has provided to its members, large and small, it was “Canada’s NATO” that successive governments in Ottawa have, through military and political commitment and re-commitment, sought to preserve. For this collective defence arrangement has been for Canada, in more ways perhaps, than for any of its other members, of particularly “providential” benefit for seventy years.